Saturday, June 14, 2014

Holding Level Strategy and Why and How it Works

Hey guys, I regularly get questions for my mage's account "why are you holding level?" and so I want to explain a couple of things to help everyone understand the strategy of holding level in Wartune.

Why some people hold a specific level?

For Wartune Free Player:
Free players, who want to be active in PvP, are almost obliged to use the hold level strategy. This is because a free player cannot win against a casher on equal terms (and especially on top level PvP), so he or she must get stronger than the casher. To do this, get very familiar with the Battleground brackets (see above in menu Analysis or click here: BG brackets) and stop taking experience when you are on the top part of the bracket where you want to remain. And just keep getting stronger and stronger while not taking any experience. Yes, you will miss rewards, but this is the price you have to pay. For free players this might take few months, but you will get very strong for your bracket and therefore can enjoy beating more and more people and raising your honor, even all the way to Lord Divine. After getting this title you have 2 choices: stop PvP completely not to lose honor and this title or continue with this strategy so that you are always the strongest in the bracket before you move to a higher bracket.
Note: this also means quitting the Battleground when you are put into the higher bracket and rejoining until you are put in the lower bracket.

For Wartune Cashers:
Cashers also do hold level, but they need it naturally less. The more money you put into the game the less you need to hold level. However, cashers also enjoy this because the combination of cash and holding level makes you extremely powerful in your Battleground bracket. Here is an example of my casher mage account who is holding level 59 and made an awesome 30 kills in 1 Battleground even:

Why some people continue to hold a level?

Even if they become a lot stronger than 95% of people of their level some people decide still to continue holding level. There are a couple of reasons for that:

They may want to be absolutely top and reach some record, like some players who are above 90k BR at level 59.

They may not have so much extra time to play (going to a higher level also means more responsibilities, more dungeon runs, need to collect new set, new enchants, new refines, etc)

They may just enjoy winning even if it is against very weak people.

They may be experimenting with Wartune, learning different classes.

What are the disadvantages of hold-level strategy?

There are, unfortunately, huge losses in rewards for those following the hold-level strategy. For example my mage is not eligible for Sky Trail to get daily rewards from there. Lower hold-level people are not eligible for sylphs or especially jewel or fishing and are therefore losing rewards daily from those. Also hold-levelers cannot participate in Spire or Tower of Kings because they are not allowed to get experience.
However, note that all of that is still worthwhile to follow this strategy because otherwise it is practically impossible, especially for free players, to get to the Lord Divine title and wear that awesome medallion (my Knight still does not have it).

Moreover, there is a new trend to put EXP rewards in the Hot Events and this means all the people holding level in Wartune are not able to collect those rewards which contain the monthly reward items. This is an additional blow, but still worth it to follow the strategy. (I hate not being able to pick up these rewards on my mage's account).

Why COSMOS Knight is not Lord Divine?

As some of you will certainly ask this I will straight away answer about my Knight. I started playing my knight almost from the beginning of the server and, not only I was not an expert of Wartune at that time, but I had and still have very nice friends in my guild. We all leveled up together and did dungeons together, so you see I could not hold back, because we grew together as friends.

My Knight actually managed to reach Imperial Commander after a very long time just by doing Guild Battles. And one day he will reach Lord Divine, but he, as pretty much a free account, has no chance to enter the level 80 Battlegrounds, so I don't even put my nose in there.

Are there any exceptions for the hold-level strategy?

Yes. There is only one exception and this is when a new server is launched. If you start on a server on Day 1 totally different rules follow (actually about many things). In this situation you have a race. You must try to get as high and as fast as possible and create as large a gap between yourself and all other players as you can. the higher you get the easier you can kill everyone (you have 50 set, others 35 for example). So a new Wartune server is an exception - you should not hold level in this case.